


Do Synths Dream of Atomic Deathclaws?

by MaevesChild



Series: Electrical Impulses [1]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Anatomy, Asexuality, Awkward Conversations, But not sex averse, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Fluff, Romance, Sexual Content, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-03
Updated: 2015-12-03
Packaged: 2018-05-04 16:01:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5340023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaevesChild/pseuds/MaevesChild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nick Valentine has never had anything that didn't belong to the other Nick Valentine first. Not yet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Something I Read in a Book Once

He wasn’t finished; it’s how he knew he was a prototype.

Nick Valentine knew a lot of things. There was a lifetime worth of memories in his head that he knew didn’t belong to him, not really.  It was easy to tell the difference between the memories he’d made since he woke up in the junk pile and the ones that had been implanted by his makers.  Those memories shaped who he was, even the name he used, but they were hazy and strange, like something half remembered from a story, not part of his real life no matter how much they made him who he was.

It was probably one of many reasons he’d been discarded.  It didn’t take.  He never thought he was human, not once he took a look at the ruined scrap heap of his body.

Didn’t mean he didn’t have feelings.  He did.  A lot of people thought synth feelings weren’t real, were just blips of errant electricity, but that wasn’t any different than what happened in a human brain, so he didn’t understand the distinction.  Emotions were strange and he seemed to be lacking in some areas, probably because he wasn’t finished.  

He wasn’t anatomically human either so some feelings, the physical ones, they hadn’t bothered with.  

Nick loved to flirt.  He loved the way open-minded humans and ghouls would blush if he’d hit a nerve.  He liked making people happy and that often did.  He had friends; people he cared about and people who cared about him.  Ellie was like family, like a daughter, even if she was flesh and he was platinum and titanium.  

But sex? He knew about sex from those old memories, from watching idiots kill each other over it, from trying to find and bring home runaway kids who got overwhelmed by their urges.  But a sex drive of his own was something he didn’t have.  He got it, he understood;  He was a test model. Why spend time on details like a johnson for a synth that could never pass for a human?

He couldn’t miss what he’d never had.  He shouldn’t be able to anyway, but he did have those misty old memories of a man who was flesh and blood and felt things the way a lot of humans did.  That man had a fiance and a series of lovers before her.  He remembered how happy the man had been able to make the people he cared about by touching them, by giving them pleasure.  Nick Valentine the man had been one hell of a lover.  Nick Valentine the synth could appreciate the memories of sighs and smiles and contented post-coitus sleep, even though his body didn’t have any urges of its own.

Up until recently, it hadn’t been anything other than a vague existential crisis for him.  It was something he thought about in the dead of night, seeing as he didn’t sleep.  It hadn’t really been anything tangible, not until she waltzed into Skinny Malone’s hideout and rescued his metal ass like a princess in a tower.

She was an amazing woman, right from the start.  She was beautiful, because damn if he wasn’t blind, and she had a smart mouth that put him to shame.  Smart enough that she talked Malone into dumping his girl in the middle of a standoff and into letting them go without a bullet fired.

The more time he spent with her, the more attached he got.  

He couldn’t sort it out.  She was his friend almost immediately and in no time at all she was family and then, then it was something else.  If he didn’t think it was utterly impossible and ridiculous, Nick could have sworn he’d fallen in love with her.

He wasn’t finished.  He wasn’t programmed to love.  He couldn’t be more than the sum of his parts, could he?  But when she kissed him and he didn’t short out entirely, he knew something had really had changed.   He’d changed.  

It wasn’t a kiss a girl couldn’t have given her brother or her father, just a chaste little peck on the right side of his face where his artificial skin was relatively intact and it was so strange, but he enjoyed how it felt.  Her fingers were wrapped around his right wrist, the one that didn’t have any semblance of skin at all, but that felt good too.

It wasn’t much; he just took out Kellogg’s mindless synths so she could focus on the man himself.  He hadn’t done anything for her he wouldn’t have done for anyone else.  But she was immeasurably grateful that murdering bastard Kellogg was dead.  So she kissed him on the cheek and if he had a stomach, it would have been full of proverbial butterflies like a fifteen year old with a crush.

When they got back to Diamond City, she fell apart and he caught her.  It was nice to not be so focused on whether or not his circuits were overloading instead.  Ellie went out to visit friends and let her use the bed instead.  Nick sat awake, as he did every night when the rest of the world was sleeping, tapping away at the terminal one finger at a time (why they hadn’t bothered programming him with typing skills when he wasn’t hacking he’d never know) to get down everything that happened.  Kellogg’s memories were fading fast, but he remembered bits and pieces and he wanted to make sure they didn’t miss anything.  He’d been at this long enough to know even the smallest details mattered.

She woke up screaming.

He ran in there, gun drawn even though his sensors hadn’t picked up a thing.  She was sitting bolt upright in the bed, tears streaming down her face, her shoulders and her hands shaking.  Nick quickly holstered his gun and went to her, sitting down the the bed, grabbing her arms as gently as he could.

“It’s all right,” he said softly.  “You’re safe.”

She swallowed hard and shook her head.  “There is no such thing as safe.”

Nick grunted in agreement  “Probably true, but you’re safe enough here, for now.  I won’t let anything happen to you. Not if I can help it.”

She forced the corner of her mouth to turn up, but it was halfhearted at best.  “I know. But I’m so sick of nightmares. I just want to feel something other than scared and angry.”

Nick frowned.  He wished there was something he could do.  He hated seeing her like this.  She was so tough, so determined, but she was only human.  After all she’d been through, how could her heart not be broken?  He blinked at her, frowning, at a loss.

“What can I do?” he asked.  

She looked at him for a very long time, not speaking.   Without thinking, he reached up wiped the tears off her face with his left hand.  He felt guilty about liking how soft her skin was and the way the dampness of her tears felt on his fingers.

Finally, she spoke.  Her words were quiet and hesitant but sincere.

“Kiss me.”  That’s all she said, but Nick swore he was going to shut down.

“What?”

“That’s what you can do,” she said.  “You can kiss me so I can feel something that doesn’t hurt.”

“But wh...I don’t think you….”  He kept changing his mind about what to say.  He wasn’t programmed with a smooth way to turn down a distraught woman because she got confused that he wasn’t really a man and didn’t know what the hell to do with her.

Well, he knew what to do, but it wasn’t the same.  He read an old pre-war book he found about skydiving once, but he wasn’t about to jump out of a vertibird to test his knowledge.  Kissing and what that almost inevitably lead to was totally out of his depth.

She frowned and kind of slumped down a little.  She looked down at her hands.  “I’m sorry, I thought…”  She sighed hard and looked up at him.  The pain he saw in her eyes was killing him.  “I thought you had feelings for…”

Before she could finish, he grabbed her face between his hands and he kissed her.  He had no idea what he was doing, but he tried to hang on to all those old hazy memories, the other man’s implanted life in his head.  He did what the flesh and blood Nick Valentine would have done as best he could, cupping the back of her head with his hand and grateful for the fact that the artificial skin and flesh inside of his mouth was still mostly intact.

He felt her fingers clutch at his jacket and at his shoulder.  The crown of her head pushed up on the brim of his hat and made it feel crooked and Nick didn’t care. She made a pleading, soft noise into his mouth; her tongue brushed over his.  She stopped shaking and melted against him.

It really was nice.  Making her happy felt good.  

It seemed like forever and also not long enough, though he knew it had been exactly 94 seconds from when their lips touched until she pulled away.  Her breathing was shallow and quick.  Her heart was beating way too fast.

“Oh god,” she said.  Her voice was dreamy.  “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted you to do that.”

Nick hardly knew what to say.  He spent enough time watching people pair off to know he shouldn’t be on anyone’s wish list.  Even if he had all his original parts still, he didn’t even remotely look human.  He might have convinced a drunk idiot or two that he was a sick ghoul, but ghouls typically had several important features he knew he lacked.

“That doesn’t make a lick of sense at all,” he said finally.  “But if it makes you happy, I’m happy.”

Her mouth quirked a little.  “But I thought you felt...don’t you…?”  She didn’t finish her question but he knew what she meant.

Nick shrugged.  “I’m a prototype synth, remember?  Clearly not a successful one either.  I’m missing some software and if you’re asking what I think you’re asking, some rather imperative pieces of hardware.”

“Oh.”  She raised her eyebrows at him.  “Damn.” She pulled away from him.  “I just assaulted you.”

Nick raised an eyebrow at her.  She couldn’t actually believe that; that was crazy.

“Hardly.”  He tilted his head down and looked at her under the brim of his hat.  “If you’ll recall, I’m the one that kissed you.”   

“But if you didn’t want to?”

“I didn’t say that.”

She looked at him again for a few achingly long moments.  Her cheeks were flushed and her eyebrows were drawn down over her eyes.  “I don’t understand.”

Nick chuckled.  “I don’t entirely either.”

“Look I just,” she seemed flustered, but her eyes were red but dry now and she wasn’t shaking anymore, so it felt like he was headed in the right direction.  “I just really like being around you.  I think I forget sometimes that we aren’t the same.  You seem so human to me.”

He tilted his head to give her a good look at the missing skin behind his jaw where the mechanical parts inside were clearly visible.  “The wires ought to be a dead giveaway.”

She smirked.  “They should be, but I don’t think they matter.  You are a person; you’ve got a soul.  I don’t care what anyone says.”  Hesitantly, she reached out towards him and he let her, and why not?  He never minded being touched, especially not by her.  Affection wasn’t beyond him.  Her fingers gently touched the torn edges, softly padded against the metal of his jaw underneath.  It was a strange but not unpleasant sensation.  He closed his eyes and wasn’t sure why, but focusing on her gentle touching was nice.  “Nick?”

He opened his eyes again, looking at her, so close again.  She seemed both at ease and on edge all at once and he didn’t know what to make of it.

“Hm?”

“Do you feel love?”

He hadn’t seen that question coming, but it was one he’d asked himself.  He felt lots of things, and it felt like he loved people, especially when he compared it to those hazy memories.  He couldn’t be sure, but it certainly felt real enough.  The man Nick Valentine loved a lot of people.  The synth Nick Valentine was pretty sure he did too.

“Yeah,” he said but almost didn’t recognize his own voice.  “I think so.”

“Good,” she said, almost whispering, fingers still delicately on his face.  “Whatever else, I hope you can.  Because I love you, Nick.”  She made a pained little sound.  “When I woke up, I wasn’t sure I’d ever feel anything good ever again.  But you proved me wrong.  This whole world might be different, you might be a different kind of man, but you are a good one.  You give me hope that this can work out, even as scared and angry as I feel sometimes.”

Nick couldn’t help but smile.  Nothing made him happier than helping people.  The idea that he helped her, made her feel hope of all things just by being there for her?  That was the reason he kept going.  

He did feel love.  He loved her too, no point in pretending it wasn’t really happening now.  But how could that possibly work?  How could he ever be enough to really keep her happy, all his... _he almost laughed_...shortcomings considered?

It felt strange to say it out loud though.  He knew what he was. He knew what people thought.  

“I do feel love,” he said.  “I love you too sweetheart, but you know that...well, I couldn’t be enough for you.”

She met his eyes, inhuman as he knew they were, her other hand coming up to grab his elbow.  She shifted her whole body toward him.  “Why not?”

“Because I know how humans are,” he said, not wanting to just come out and say it, but she seemed to be missing the point entirely.  “I’ve found enough pairs of kids trying to elope, enough husbands shacked up with their mistresses to know that you’re not going to be content with what I can give you.”

She looked a little pale.  But he’d been pretty clear about what he wasn’t packing already.  This couldn’t be a surprise.  It did make him sad though.  He didn’t feel any need for that sort of thing, but he had those memories and the idea of making her that happy felt like something he wanted to do.  But what could he do?  Well, he knew there were things that he was capable of, but he’d never even attempted them.  And he didn’t feel those same urges, those needs for himself.  Would it be enough?

The pressure of her fingers on his face lessened, almost disappeared. “Does touching bother you?”

Nick shook his head.  “No, I like affection.  They didn’t forget to put that in me.”

She cocked her head.  “Did it bother you when you kissed me?”

“No.”  He sort of frowned.  It was an odd thing.  He didn’t feel any urge to do it, except that he wanted to make her happy.  But once it was happening he found that he enjoyed it, though from his memories, in a different way than a human man would.  

“Then why can’t it work?”  Her fingers tightened on his arm.  “Unless you don’t want to.”

Nick felt her words in the middle of his body.  He felt an ache, a ping of electric current firing across wires and circuits.  There was pain at the idea of walking away from her and hope, anticipation at the idea of trying, at the idea that a synth could be more than just a tool, even as much freedom as he’d found.  He thought of himself as a tool, always had.  He liked to be useful and make people happy and do things that were good and right and made the world better, but he still thought of himself as closer related to a hammer than a human.

“I wouldn’t even know where to start,” he admitted.  “Knowing things, it’s not the same as doing them.”

“I know,” she said.  “Trust me.  But I’ve done a lot of things recently I never imagined I could.”  She shifted closer again.  “I want to be with you Nick, whatever that means.”

He didn’t know what it meant.  He knew what the man, that man who’d lived 200 years ago, had.  He had a lover and a life and a sense of justice so big you could drive a bus through it.  But he knew he wasn’t Nick Valentine, not that Nick.  He hadn’t ever really had anything that was his except the few lives he’d managed to make better along the way.

Why not? Wasn’t it time that he had something of his own, something that was just his and not the remnant of some long dead man the Institute planted into his head?

Why not?  He couldn’t think of a damn single reason why not.  They’d done the impossible already, what was figuring out how to make love and be in love with a woman he was already crazy about after that?

“Yeah,” he said.  It felt like forever, but to her ears, he spoke right away. Maybe too fast.  But she smiled; she smiled big and wide and all the way to her eyes like he hadn’t seen her ever do since the moment he met her.  “Yeah, I’d like that.”


	2. Jumping Out of a Vertibird

“Come here,” she said. Her voice was lower, huskier than usual and he liked it.

He was out of his depth here.  He let her move him, move herself until they were half wrapped around each other, still sitting up on the edge of the bed.  She leaned forward and kissed the corner of his mouth.  She moved, pressed her lips against his and this part he knew how to do so he kissed her back.

She made that little moan again and he drank it up.  He liked the smooth, supple texture of her skin, the way her lips molded to his.  It was a sensation he almost remembered, but not quite.  His own skin didn’t respond the same way it should have, but she didn’t seem to mind,  She grabbed his tie and pulled herself closer, closer still. Closer until she just gave in and swung her leg over him and straddled his lap.

His memories provided him with a vivid memory of exactly what she should feel in this intimate position, but he knew there wasn’t anything for her to feel.  It made him instantly sad, like if he was an actual man, actually Nick Valentine he’d be able to satisfy her in ways he wasn’t capable of.

He pulled back and opened his mouth to say something, but she stopped him with her fingers over his lips before he could.  He frowned behind the gentle touch of her hands.  He wished he felt something more than just the satisfying press of her weight on him.

“Shh,” she hushed him softly.  “I can see what you’re thinking and it doesn’t matter.”

His eyes questioned her.

“It doesn’t matter.”  There was no doubt there.  “I want you, just like you are.  We’ll make this work, I promise.”  

She climbed off of him and scooted herself up on the bed, into the middle.  She crooked her finger at him, but he didn’t move.  He knew what he was supposed to do, but he felt strange, disconnected from that part of him.  She reached out and grabbed his tie but didn’t pull, just rubbed her fingers over the worn fabric.

“Nick,” she said. “What’re you thinking?”

He tilted his head down and put his hand on top of his hat, gripping it with the palm of his hand.  He took it off, set it down in his lap and looked up at her.  With his hat on, he could almost see a little bit of a man in his reflection, but when he took it off, he was just a machine.  He didn’t have hair, and there was a distinctive seam where his forehead ended.  It was frayed where it met the replicated skin that stretched over the rest of his metal skull.  He looked at her with eyes he knew were just glowing yellow disks set into his grey face.

“Look at me,” he said.  “Really look.” He shook his head.  “You don’t want this.”

She sighed.  “I do.”  She tugged on his tie a little.  “I know who you are.  I know what you are.  And I want you, just like that.”

“Wouldn’t you rather…”

She cut him off.  “No.  Whatever you’re thinking, no.  Please, come here.  You said liked it when I touched you.  Let me.  Please.”

She tugged gently on his tie again and this time he let her guide him.  He laid down, his chest half on her, one leg draped between hers.  She reached the knot of his tie and pulled until it hung loose around his neck.  She put her palm on his chest, just below the crook of his neck and tips of her fingers touched the gap in his skin there.  She only smiled faintly.

“Kiss me again Nick,” she asked and so he did.  When their lips touched, he felt it again, that stray electric shock in his chest, in the place where his heart would be if he had one.  Her hand came up around his neck, cradling the back of his head.  He felt her tongue, soft and damp and warm against his.  She made that supplicating sound again, deep in her throat and pushed her  her hips against his thigh between her legs.

He focused on remembering how to kiss her, on moving his lips, his tongue over hers, hoping to coax that sweet sound out of her again.  He tried not to think about anything else except exactly that, about how she was just opening up, the tension disappearing from her body the more he touched her.  She shifted again, rubbed herself against his leg.

The sound she made this time was unmistakable arousal.  He’d heard that sound enough times to know what it meant.  

He was almost afraid to touch her with the bare metal of his right hand, but he tried anyway, just on her shoulder at first but she arched her whole body up against his hand when he did it, slipping down over the old flannel shirt she was wearing, in between where the buttons had come undone to the smooth delicate skin above her breasts.  She moved her mouth only enough so she could speak.

“Touch me,” she whispered, breathless.  He undid the button. And another.  Two more and the shirt slid open.  His forehead was pressed against hers, his face angled so he could look at her.  She was beautiful, all that creamy skin underneath, small breasts laying on her flushed chest.  He moved his hand a little lower.  Her skin was warm and silky and he imagined the metal of his hand must be so cold.  She put her hand over his, where there should have been skin only sleek metal but she didn’t seem to mind at all.  She moved his hand for him, sliding it down lower until his fingers brushed over the peak of her nipple.

She gasped.  He stopped.

“Oh,” she said, her eyes squeezing shut.  “Yes.”

Nick knew a man would have been out of his mind with desire.  Half the damn Commonwealth would have wanted to put a bullet through his head for the chance to be where he was right now.  His body didn’t respond at all, that weird disconnected feeling again but still he felt right, warm, grateful to touch her anyway.  

He really did love her.  He loved that touching her was making her react like this.  It couldn’t matter what his body did or didn’t do.

She said he had a soul.  He could feel it there instead somehow.

He’d never really explored these memories too deeply, except with a feeling of emptiness, but now his circuits were firing wildly, gathering all the information he could.  There were some really vivid tidbits tucked away in his mechanical brain.  He remembered details, smells, very careful figure-8s made with tentative 16-year-old fingers in the backseat of a car.  He remembered an adult man and the woman he was supposed to marry finding a moment of furious release in the closet during Thanksgiving dinner.  He remembered pent up desire and masturbation.  He remembered a feeling of being so close to someone it was hard to tell where he ended and they began.  

That was something he still wanted.

He compiled all those disjointed memories into a plan of action.  He wanted to make her happy.  He wanted to make sure she understood how much he cared about her.  He wanted her to not be afraid and to feel things that gave her hope and the strength to keep going.

Nick grabbed her shoulder and flipped over on to his back, pulling her up on top of him.  He knew his body was heavier than she realized.  He knew he wanted to watch her, watch closely every tiny flicker of expression and reaction to make sure he did everything right.

She took a sharp intake of air when he did it, in surprise but in relief too.  He didn’t want her to think he wasn’t willing to do this all the way, no matter how it might have seemed.  He didn’t have any parts that had that distracting, obsessive, hot feeling of arousal, but everything else was utterly committed to making this something worth making a brand new memory out of.

She shrugged that threadbare flannel shirt off her shoulders.  Nick put his left hand, his hand that looked as human as any part of him could, on the slight hollow of her sternum between her breasts where the skin was so pale from never seeing the sun, all soft and slightly damp from her sweat.  She put her hand over his.  He could feel her heart thumping in her chest.

She looked down at him with complete rapt adoration. If he had tear ducts, he swore he would have cried.

Nick had a plan however and he was sticking to it.  He pushed away those parts, those remembrances of slurs and bigotry that tried to remind him what he wasn’t and what he couldn’t do and instead on all those little tricks stored away in those implanted memories.  He slid his hand lower until his fingertips reached the top of her panties.  He made eye contact. Waited for permission.

She smiled down at him and seemed to understand.  In reply, she shifted forward, lifted her hips up off of his.  He slipped his fingers into the worn elastic, through the crisp curls, down lower.  She groaned softly as his fingers explored, moving against the overheated, slick flesh until he found the hardness of her clit under his fingertip.  Instead of some old trick stuck in his head, he just moved his finger, slower, faster, with varying pressure, watching her face as he did, listening to the pace of her breathing, changing accordingly.  

She made a long, low sound. “Oh god, Nick.”  Her voice made him feel powerful enough to take on a gang of raiders by himself.  Circuits fired wildly.

He moved his hand, shifted it down further and crooked his fingers until they slipped inside of her, his thumb worrying at her clit.  The sensation was incredible, the moisture that flooded over his hand, the way her muscles clenched down on his fingers.  Her head fell back, her mouth half open and her hips pushed down.

He remembered.  He remembered that feeling, he remembered the first time and the last time Nick Valentine was inside a woman and how it felt so incredible and when it was Jenny and he loved her it was like they were sharing the same air, the same soul at least for a few ragged heartbeats.

He felt it.  It didn’t matter that the sexual ache wasn’t in his own skin.  Her pleasure was enough for him.  This was his.

Her thighs shuddered and she jerked forward coming down and kissing him hard.  The muscles inside her throbbed around his fingers, he felt the heat as her skin flushed, the shiver passing through her entire body.  It seemed to go on for an amazing amount of time before she finally collapsed and slid down beside him, tucking herself in the crook of his arm.  She was breathing hard.  She clung to him.

He moved his hand from between her legs and wrapped it around her waist, putting her even closer.  Slowly, she caught her breath, nuzzled against him.  Her heartbeat slowed.  Her body was soft and relaxed against him.  He could feel the contentment just rolling off of her.  

“Love you Nick.”  Her voice was sleepy and calm.  It thrilled him that he made her feel like that.  Maybe they really could make this work.  It was a crazy, broke down world, but stranger things happened all the time.  

He kissed her on the forehead and listened as her breathing got slow and even.  She was asleep, but peacefully this time.  He didn’t sleep, but he hated the idea of moving away from her.  Maybe if he stayed, it would keep her nightmares away.  That was reason enough.

He didn’t sleep, but he closed his eyes anyway and let his mind drift.  He wondered what it might be like to skydive after all.  Maybe he’d try that one day too.


End file.
